Wallpaper Tips
BCFA Member, Linwood, has put together wallpaper tips to help interior designers with choosing and specifying wallpaper. Along with paint, wallpaper adds instant color and pattern to your home; two things the Linwood team loves. As with many things in life, it can feel rather daunting if you’ve never dipped your toe into the world of wallpaper before. Which design to choose? Should the paint colour match? Wallpaper first, or furniture? To help you through the many choices, see the highlighted our top six styling tips…
TIP 1: Create a calm, serene space
Being able to close the door of our bedrooms and escape to a much nicer place, is one of the joys of life. To create a room that suggests ‘rest’, choose a bedroom wallpaper that celebrates the beauty of nature, ideally with a healthy mix of tranquil blues and greens. Just look at how pretty, Miji Blossom is with its birds perched amongst bamboo and delicately scented blossom. This lovely room gets the texture just right too: from the headboard covered in wool (Lars, Pearl) to the layered bed and gorgeous carved bedroom tables. Fuss-free yet reassuringly confident.
TIP 2: Be brave…
Now to the cloakroom… is it one of the clichés of modern decorating to add a wallpaper to the downstairs loo? Maybe, but it’s also one of the cleverest and most affordable decorating tips. With just one or two rolls you can transform this space and remember this is somewhere that most guests will actually see and take in every detail. Here is our new Double Dragon in Mango, which feels just right if you are looking for max impact. Other contenders are: Nightfall, col Pitch that depicts a fantasy forest or one of our old favourites, Jungle Jive, Midnight – a flamboyant design featuring leopards and tropical birds against a backdrop full of lively colour.
TIP 3: Celebrate your home
The Linwood way would be to choose a wallpaper – one of their own designs, obviously – and then create a room around it, but there’s one exception to this rule: architectural details. If you’re lucky enough to live in a period house, then we feel it’s only right to let the house choose the wallpaper. Monkey Puzzle, Paradise, which depicts a classical landscape of tropical palms and monkeys looks rather good against this sweeping Georgian staircase and panelling. When thinking about wallpaper designs, you don’t have to be rigid but sympathetic is good.
TIP 4: Make a statement…
One of the most effective ways to enhance the beauty of a wallpaper is to choose a matching colour for your wall paint. Yanagi’s bright pastel palette of beautiful mountains, willows and Oriental-style buildings works perfectly with the Pink Slip 220 by Little Green. The attention-seeking cement tiles finish the look perfectly – sometimes a statement wallpaper just calls for more statements.
TIP 5: Choose your accessories…
One smart trick that ties in a room beautifully is to pick fabric that is the perfect colour match to your wallpaper. Here, our new Les Fauves, which was hand painted by Linwood’s design team in a fresh, Scandi-inspired colour palette looks rather wonderful with this sofa from Love Your Home, covered in Mantis from Juno with cushions in Omega velvet, Lemon. To stop it looking ‘too done’, throw in something unexpected such as a modern floor lamp.
TIP 6: Play with colour
A rather overlooked styling tip is colour saturation, a clean sweep goes along way. The Wave, Ocean with its undulating, dramatic pattern looks even more beautiful with the dado, skirting and door painted in just the right shade of blue (Marine Blue 95, Little Green). The more of one single colour you use, the most powerful it becomes.
Feeling inspired? And hopefully a little more reassured with our selection of home décor ideas. Wallpaper is an easy win – it has the power to transform any room, so it seems a shame not to use it somewhere in your home.
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